Can You Ever Really Know Someone?

When we hear after the fact about the tangled webs that sociopathic liars weave, it's
hard to believe their victims were so gullible. You simply had to be there, explains writer Walter Kirn, who was snowed by one of the most infamous fantasists.

He never so much as blinked when he was lying, and he lied about practically everything, to everyone. The lies were outlandish, almost beyond belief, which may be one of the reasons, paradoxically, why I and others found them so believable—who would dare to concoct such wild tales? He lied about his family background, pretending to be a blue blood and an orphan whose parents had died in a car wreck when he was young and whose only living sibling was a sister confined to a private mental hospital. He lied about his profession, describing himself as a "freelance central banker" who ran the economies of Third World nations using sophisticated software loaded on his personal computer. He lied about the art that he collected. The Pollocks, Rothkos, and Mondrians hanging in his New York City apartment had come to him through an inheritance, he told me, as well as several hush-hush deals with cash-strapped European museums.

But the paintings were forgeries, and so was he. The outrageous impostor who called himself Clark Rockefeller was my friend for 10 years—from 1998, when I dined with him and his then wife, Sandra Boss, at a private club in midtown Manhattan, to the summer of 2008, when the FBI arrested him for kidnapping his noncustodial daughter from a street in central Boston. That's when the ugly truth about him surfaced, shocking those of us who thought we knew him, and devastating my faith in my own judgment.

Not only was "Clark" not related to the Rockefellers, he wasn't even an American. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter (his real name) was, it turned out, a German national who had moved to the U.S. from rural Bavaria in 1979 at age 17. He'd perfected his stuffy accent and posh manner by aping a sitcom character, of all things: Thurston Howell III, of Gilligan's Island. A few years later, in 1985, while posing as a young British aristocrat in the fancy Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, he'd murdered John Sohus, his landlady's grown son, and buried the chopped-up corpse in her backyard. The remains lay undiscovered for almost a decade (a swimming-pool contractor finally dug them up), giving the perpetrator plenty of time to flee in his victim's truck to the East Coast and reemerge with a new identity. Not until March 2013 was he finally convicted of the slaying and sentenced to life in prison in California.

During Gerhartsreiter's three-week trial, I learned that I was not his only dupe. I also learned that the deceptions of a true sociopath are not like the lies told by ordinary people. Not only are they bolder and more elaborate, they're carefully tailored to the listener, cut and measured for a perfect fit. To me, a writer, Clark portrayed himself as a frustrated author with a desk full of unpublished science fiction novels based, he said, on his favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. To Sandra Boss, a Harvard MBA who worked as a high-level management consultant during their 12-year marriage, he pretended to be a member of the Trilateral Commission, the elite international public-policy group. To Ralph Boynton, a Wall Street banker from whom Clark obtained a coveted internship by walking into his office off the street and requesting an inter-view on the spot, he posed as an eager student of high finance fascinated by municipal bonds.

The trial's most memorable story of deception was told by a woman named Mihoko Manabe, who was Clark's live-in girlfriend for seven years in the late 1980s and early '90s, before he married Boss. Manabe was working as a translator at the New York office of Nikko Securities, the Japanese investment firm, when she fell for a new employee, Christopher Crowe. He told her he was the brother of Cameron Crowe, the Hollywood director, and said he had been a producer of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One day a police detective called Manabe and asked to speak with her boyfriend, who wasn't at home. When she informed Crowe of the troubling call, he managed to convince her that the lawman was actually a secret agent involved in a murky assassination plot. Crowe hinted that he had been a spy himself once, and gradually he drew his trusting girlfriend into a life of evasion and deceit. They left their apartment building by separate entrances, never walked on the same side of the street, and drove their household trash to Pennsylvania, where they disposed of it in a public Dumpster. Manabe cut off all contact with her family and even helped Crowe bleach his hair. She also provided him with a credit card issued on her own account. It bore an alias, Clark Rockefeller, which he'd dreamed up one night so he could get a table at a crowded restaurant.

We all play the fool from time to time—in romance, in business, in our social lives—but rarely does the role consume us the way it did Manabe, threatening to blot out her very selfhood. She testified in a pained, embarrassed whisper and was rewarded with looks of incredulity from certain jaded reporters and trial watchers. Clark's defense team questioned her truthfulness, insinuating that no one could be so gullible. I knew differently, however. I was familiar with how the master worked, ingeniously warping one's reason and common sense with a mixture of brazen, eccentric claims and impressive, convincing props. The night I first dined with him and Sandy, we sat at a table high up in a skyscraper that overlooked the city. During dessert, he pointed out the window at the lights of Rockefeller Center and suggested we take a private tour. He had the key, he said. The master key. I was dumbfounded and glanced at Sandy, who was rolling her eyes. Was Clark joking? I couldn't tell. The tour was called off because of the late hour, but the next day, when I saw the art in his apartment—tens of millions of dollars' worth, it looked like—I decided that the key might well be real.

Toward the end of the trial, Boss took the stand. She was dressed in crisp, expensive clothes and had a businesslike, no-nonsense bearing that contrasted with her testimony. She said that she met Clark at a costume party based on Clue, the murder-mystery board game. He was dressed as Professor Plum, as she recalled, and she found him uncommonly intelligent and refreshingly unconventional. She never suspected that he wasn't who he said he was, despite his increasingly odd behavior. He refused to go out in public without a hat. He wired their country house with multiple phone lines linked to different area codes. This was a privacy measure, he insisted, intended to obscure his whereabouts from people who might wish to do him harm. A Rockefeller couldn't be too careful, particularly one who owned a research lab devoted to top-secret rocket technology. When asked if she'd seen any evidence of Clark's lab, Boss admitted that she hadn't. She had, however, glimpsed a fax once that bore the words Trilateral Commission.

I empathized with Sandy. We'd both been chumps, partly because we'd lacked imagination. One hallmark of the sociopathic liar is grandiosity. His tales reflect an inflated sense of self, sometimes reaching levels so extreme that they defy normal means of verification. Instead of challenging them, you let them pass, confused about how you might check them if you wanted to—and concerned that you might stir up conflict if you tried. Once, on a visit to Clark's country house, I'd complained of a tax bill from the IRS. Clark whipped out a notebook, scribbled down a phone number, and ripped it out for me. He said it was President Bush's private line and urged me to call it and ask for help.

I froze. I stuffed it in my pocket and never dialed it, fearing that on the off chance it was genuine I might draw scrutiny from the Secret Service. On another occasion, at his New York club, Clark told me about a conversation he'd had with a U.S. Navy admiral about a secret treaty with China that granted the country our permission to invade Taiwan. Instead of pressing him for details, I hailed the waiter and asked for a fresh drink. Why rock the boat when relaxing with a Rockefeller? That's where my own grandiosity came in.

The sociopath, a profoundly hollow creature, instinctively feeds on his victims' insecurities, which is his way of turning the tables on his own. He plays on their narcissism, their egotism. In my case, the fabulous story I told myself about my friendship with a wealthy heir was the lie that made all of Clark's lies believable. I wanted to believe the best about him so I could believe the best about myself. In jail, after he was convicted, I asked him outright how he'd fooled so many people over the years. He grinned at me through the thick security glass, looking me directly in the eyes. It was incredibly simple, he revealed.